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Comment by bo1024 | Hacker News Reader

The issue is just transparency. You want to know how much memory you actually have available for use if you need it. How would you like it if your car's gas gauge was close to empty all the time because the car was caching gas for long trips?

It would seem there's a simple solution -- another number on the system monitor displaying how much memory is available for use if needed.

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Flawed analogy: you use up the gas and your car stops. You use up memory and … the kernel swaps pages around. Now, if the kernel isn't giving you back memory, that's a problem, but the OP doesn't actually show that this is happening.

No, it captures what I want to worry about. I do not want to be in the situation where processes that I am interacting with in real time are paging stuff out to disk. This is really bad for my user experience.

So if my memory is "full" with a bunch of just-in-case stuff, I'll gladly swap it out for real data that a real running process is using it. But if it's "full" of data in use for running processes, then I want to think twice about opening a new application. And I want my memory manager to tell me the difference between those two "full" cases.

               total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
  Mem:       2042520    1816496     226024          0     294344     486908
  -/+ buffers/cache:    1035244    1007276
  Swap:      4194300       8172    4186128

I don't know what you are using to view your memory usage, but any decent tool should give you at least the information that `free` does (see above).

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